SuperSite Blog Daily Update: November 25, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving, if you're celebrating.

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Someone is making IE 6, 7, 8, and 9 available to Mac users as ie4mac. This didn't make too much sense to me at first, but then the utility of it became obvious, at least for web developers and those office workers that need specific site compatibilty. Why any Mac user would actually want to use IE as their browser is, however, unclear.

Thanks to Tom G. for the link.

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The Beatles appear to have done well by iTunes: According to Apple, fans have purchased over 450,000 Beatles albums and over 2 million individual tracks in the first week of availability. The best-selling Beatles album in the US is "Abbey Road" while "Here Comes the Sun," a relatively-rare song with George Harrison lead vocals, is the number one track.

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The New York Times has a good read about Google Chrome OS, and some obvious questions about where Android and Chrome OS overlap.

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We all know Apple's computers are overly expensive for what you get, but this is ridiculous.

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Speaking of Apple, the company finally released iOS 4.2 (well, 4.2.1) this week. This is a pretty important update, despite the vaguely minor-sounding version number. And as many have pointed out to me by email, it also brings with it the free version of Find My iPhone, which previously required the annual MobileMe subscription. That Microsoft includes a free service called Find My Phone with every Windows Phone is, I'm sure, completely coincidental, and doesn't represent a response by Apple in any way, shape, or form. Cough.

Discuss this Article 2

gavers
on Nov 25, 2010
Too bad ie4mac isn't actually running IE on your Mac: "ie4mac makes this possible by running a cluster of Windows Terminal Servers and delivering the Internet Explorer to your Mac using a protocol called RDP." While seeing your site rendered in four versions of IE has some usefulness to it, you couldn't use this for any sort of performance testing or for intranet sites. It also looks like it's going to end up being a paid service. There already exist services that generate renders in a variety of Mac, Windows and Linux browsers, which is more useful. Firefox for example renders slightly different on each OS.
subzerohitman721
on Nov 25, 2010
Speaking of IE 9, I did like the update. But Paul, IE 9 still has a an annoying lag/delay that frankly I'm not seeing in Chrome or RockMelt. I'm using the 64 bit version of IE 9 on the Supersite & few others as a mild test. I'd have to say with the most recent update, RockMelt looks and performs far better than IE9. Revenge of Netscape? It's looking like RockMelt is in a better position in it's beta than IE 9. Even with the hardware acceleration, Microsoft needs to get cracking on getting the performance bottlenecks worked out. I did get i0S 4.2 on my iPod Touch. Nice subtle improvement. But I don't understand why a simple features such as a background image on an 2nd generation iPod Touch is so difficult for Apple to do? Technically, the original G1 & HTC Hero have similar specs to an 2nd generation iPod Touch & has full support for that feature.

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